These essays discuss trauma studies as refracted through literature, focusing on the many ways in which the terms â€˜cultural traumaâ€™ and â€˜personal traumaâ€™ intertwine in postcolonial fiction. In a catastrophic age such as the present, trauma itself may serve to provide linkage through cross-cultural understanding and new forms of community. Western colonization needs to be theorized in terms of the infliction of collective trauma, and the postcolonial process is itself a post-traumatic cultural formation and condition. Moreover, the Westâ€™s claim on trauma studies (via the Holocaust) needs to be put in a perspective recuperating other, non-Western experiences.